CUPID'S TRIUMPHS AND MISTAKES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 294, 6 May 1911, Page 9

CUPID'S TRIUMPHS AND MISTAKES.

YEAR'S LOVE STORIKS TOLD IX FIG CUES. _ Among the many official publications issued by the Imperial Government departments in the course of a year none hides so many curious romances as arcto be found in (lie tables of figures prepared by the Registrar-General. There is a love story in every figure of that section of his work dealing with marriages, and in many cases tile love story is one regarding which it would be extremely interesting to have further details. Possibly it is due to the engrossing nature of the work and the speculations to which it gives rise, that the Blue Book for which the registrar is responsible is always more Lhan a year behind. Thus it is the volume sotting out Cupid's work in I!) 0!) that is now to hand. One can well understand, however, the clerk in the Registrar-General's office lingerin" over his task. ° °

Who, for instance, could puss by the fact lliat one marriage was that of a bachelor over eighty-five years of age. His bride was a spinster over seventy. Was it a case of a misunderstanding in youth cleared up at last? Then there were the five marriages in which the brides were over thirty-five and bridegrooms under twenty. Here a W. W. Jacobs seems to be necessary to do justice to the story. There was a spinster of seventy who married a man of forty, and five girls under eighteen who married men over fifty, and the girl of twenty-one whoso bridegroom was over seventy. What was the romance hidden there? Or, again, he might have paused to wonder what degree of happiness, or the reverse, attended the 360 marriages in which both brides and bridegrooms were under nineteen years, or the even more daring case of the bride of fifteen who married a youth of eighteen. it might indeed have made him shudder when he realised from the figures before him that in all 10,377 young men under twenty-one years of age took on themselves the responsibilities of marriage, twenty-nine of them marrving widows. A touch of tragedy would come into his thoughts as he paused over the story of the young widow of nineteen who married a youth of her own age, and of the three widowers under twentyone. Or, as he went further, to find that in all eighteen girls under twentyone remarried, four of them marrying widowers. And so one might go on recapitulating the quaint matrimonial arrangements made by Cupid during the year. Here are just a few more of these condensed romances: Of the 16,00(1 widows who remarried, 8,133 cbo.se bachelors; while of the 22,200 widowers who remarried, 14,327 were accepted by spinsters. Among the 244,538 spinsters who married, 1,728 did not state their ages; wuile of the 10,000 widows, 441 were equally coy. Thero were 1,005 spinsters over fifty years of age among the brides, fifteen of them being over seventy. One widow of eighty-five was remarried. Only 230 of the 238,344 bachelors married were over fifty years of a ff e. Four girls of sixteen years married widowers. An idea of the change that has taken place in the marriages during the past fifty years mav be seen in tile following table:— " Per 1000 Marriages, 1860 1909 First Marriages—Bachelors 801 915 Spinsters 010 930 Remarriages—Widowers .. 130 85 Widows 00 61 Under 21 years—Men 03 40 Women 194 137 Signed by Mark—Men 255 11 Women 362 13 Thus we see the effect of the later age in life at which the average marriage is made on tile number of widows and widowers remarried, and also on the number of minors who marry, while the result of modern educational methods is seen in the great reduction in the number of brides and bridegrooms who could not write. It is a curious fact that the marriage of minors is more common in Scotland than in England and Wales, while in Ireland the proportion of such marriages is far below that of either Scotland or England and Wales. In England anil Wales the highest proportion of marriages amongst minors was to be found in the mining and manufacturing counties, and the lowest in the agricultural counties. One interesting fact which appears ill the report is that the number of widows is always much greater than that of widowers, because, in the first place, men marry later in life than women; second, because the duration of life among men is shorter than that among women; and third, because the proportion of widows who remarry is much lower than the proportion of widowers who remarry.